


The Look: 100 AUs

by Cards_Slash



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Other, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 03:57:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16865704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: A collection of (what will hopefully be) 100 AUs based on that look Steve and Tony exchange in the beginning of Civil War.  main Pairings/Ratings in chapter titles.





	1. The War | PG | No Pairing

**Author's Note:**

> The premise of the 100 AUs is incredibly simple. I love this gif, and I hate Civil War, so I’m just going to keep rewriting the scene as long as I can. The goal is 100 but lets see how far I make it.

Steve had learned a lot from war: the value of brotherhood, and laughter, and joy. (He’d learned the other things too, like the value of bullets, and strength and speed. He’d learned the value of human life when he’d made the choice to kill one man to save another. He’d become real familiar with that rusty set of scales, asking him to make split second choices that no man could justify with any longer period of time.) 

But the other stuff, he hadn’t learned that in war. He’d learned that long before Erskine had decided to take a chance on him. He’d learned that at a funeral, standing up straight and keeping himself together, thinking how ugly and unfair the world was (really). 

War had taken his father, and it had taken his mother, and it had taken Bucky, and it had taken him. 

Steve shouldn’t have outlived the war he’d died in, and every now and again, when the world hit an ugly chord like this, he couldn’t help but remember that slim sliver of relief he’d felt when he knew it was going to end. 

The relief was gone, the war was not. It was on the TV, in bright-big-letters, being belted out across every cable station playing in the conference room. The war they’d been trying to avoid in all the years he’d been asleep–that war had finally come. 

Or maybe the men in charge of bullets and bombs had simply gotten tired of calling it anything but what it was. 

There was a paper on the table, with a Presidential seal, asking Tony if couldn’t he find it in his heart to take up where his Daddy had left off. If Stark didn’t have a few good weapons left in him, if he didn’t he think it was his patriotic duty to build the tools the government needed to protect the brave men and women that were serving the country.

There was a headline scrolling across one of the TV, Where is Captain America Now, and a woman on the TV with tears in her eyes.

World War Three had officially begun.


	2. The Divorce | PG | (former) Steve/Tony

They had opted out of a courtroom and that was just as well when they’d never gone in for the formality of marriage anyway. Tony had liked the story, how it had been a spur of the moment thing, a very long time ago now, the exact kind of wild choice that belonged in Las Vegas. (And everyone knew what people had to say about what happened in Vegas and where it ought to stay.) Steve had kissed him under a wedding arch, with a Elvis type proclaiming it an official union. 

Maybe it should have felt like less like getting caught in an exhilarating whirlwind and more like being dragged out by an undertow, but Tony had been happy to be taken on the ride. He’d held on with both hands, he’d thrown himself into it. He was part of a matched set. 

(There were commemorative salt and pepper shakers of their union, for fucks sake. Salt and fucking Pepper shakers.)

He used to like the story, but it had turned ugly. It had gone sour. It had been a story of stupidity, not impetuous. It had been the history of a mistake, not the start of a happy ending. Steve had kissed him under a wedding arch but he maybe he didn’t mean it to be forever.

Or maybe forever was longer than Steve had anticipated.

Things didn’t fall apart. There were no cracks. 

What had been there yesterday was not here today. That was all there was to it. No explanations given. No explanations needed. Now they were sitting in a room with a private judge and mediator, while Steve the righteous, quietly agreed that he would be happy to leave the marriage with exactly what he’d walked in with. 

They were no worse for the wear; no better off for the loss. 

There was no courtroom, no gavel, no hammer to announce the end. It was just a judge pulling off her glasses, looking up from the papers she was all set to sign, informing that they were now officially divorced.


	3. Mask | PG | No Pairing

Steve had said it before (more than once) but he was always willing to say it again. If five-foot-four Steve Rogers had met Tony Stark in nineteen-thirties Brooklyn, it would have ended in bloody noses and bruises fists. Hell, two-thousand-and-twelve Steve Rogers had almost taken a swing at Tony Stark and he liked to think that two-thousand-and-twelve Steve Rogers had learned how to play nice with others.

(Playing nice, of course, being a subjective term meaning, as nicely as possible, where the definition of nice meant not punching someone he definitely did want to punch.) 

It was just Tony’s face.

It wasn’t Tony’s fault for having the face he had. A face that carried a certain defensive smugness on it. A face that must have been sculpted to reflect only what the viewer wanted to see. A face any man could love, assuming any man could understand what he was looking at.

More than that, more than anything else, Steve had learned that Tony’s face was misleading. That his nerve-grating grins and his lustful side-eyes and his all-business glares couldn’t be trusted to reflect what the man was thinking. Tony had engineered and built all the armor the Avengers used, he’d built his the Iron Man suit and before that he’d built weapons. The man had a forty-five year head start on building an arsenal of looks to protect whatever he was thinking behind his face.

The unknowableness of Tony’s thoughts made Steve want to punch him too. At least six days out of the seven of the week he found himself second guessing if he were even close to right.

And then there was moments like this, this one right here, with Secretary Ross all pink in the face, shouting from the screen in front of them, doing his best to imitate a cartoon bomb on the verge of exploding. The Avengers had gone off and done it again, they’d gone off and prevented another catastrophe, and they’d broken a few eggs, and they’d ruffled a few feathers. 

Nobody had died, but property damage was somewhat rampant where the HYDRA agents had decided to forego their attempt at subtlety in favor of high caliber automatic guns. It was a small miracle that nobody had died.

(Not a miracle, it had been a lot of work, and the strategic placement of half the Iron Legion that now had to be repaired.) 

Steve glanced back at Tony, to see what kind of face they were putting on. To see if they were protesting or accepting. Tony was looking at his hands, shoulders forward in an Academy Award Winning representation of a man who believed he deserved to be chastised. Steve didn’t understand the rubric that Tony used to decide what face he was wearing, but he’d developed enough trust in the man to follow his lead when it came to reacting to men in government positions playing Monday Morning Quarterback.

So he kept his mouth shut, and he kept his face lax, and he played the part of a little boy who deserved a whipping.

When the screen went off, and the room cooled, Tony snorted from where he was sitting behind him. “I thought he would never shut up.”


	4. Parent-Teacher Conference | G | Stony + Neighbor kid Peter

“Wait,” Tony said. They were six steps from the door, looking exactly like someone might assume two fathers would look when dragged away from the very important business of their day. (The fact that they were not, in fact, Peter’s fathers wasn’t nearly as important as the pretense.) “Let’s go over the plan again.”

“I know the plan,” Steve said.

The trouble with Steve wasn’t that he didn’t always know the plan. He always knew the plan. The trouble was that knowing the plan never seemed to be an important enough factor in following the plan. “We’re going to go in there, shake hands, and be very disappointed in our son.”

“I thought he was our nephew,” Steve said.

“Our son like nephew,” Tony said. “That’s all we’re going to do, Steve. We’re not going to argue with the teacher. We’re not going to tell them that they are wrong. We are not going to demand they reduce the length of the suspension or that they remove the entire incident from his record. We’re just going to be disappointed.”

There was no chance that Steve was going to make it through a meeting with this math teacher and maintain a level of acceptable disappointment. It wasn’t that he agreed with what Peter had done; he didn’t even agree with being a stand-in for Peter’s real parent. No, Steve’s problem was that he had never met an authority figure that he wanted to agree with. He never saw a fight that wasn’t worth fighting. “If you didn’t think I could do this, why did you ask me come?”

Tony had not asked. Tony had advised against the inclusion of his well-intentioned boyfriend, but Peter had his heart set on having both of them. Tony was Italian (or close enough) and that meant he could pass as someone related to Aunt May, and Steve was. Well, Steve was– 

Intimidating.

“Disappointed,” Tony repeated. “We’re going to be very disappointed in our son-nephew.”

Steve sighed at him. “Fine.”

“If you feel like you might want to start objecting, just look at me.”

Peter leaned back out of the classroom door, looking as sharp as a sixteen year old could possibly look, wearing a tie that Tony had fixed in the parking lot and a suit that he probably had outgrown the year before. “Coming Uncle Tony?”

“We’ll be right there, kid,” Tony said. “Disappointed?”

“The most disappointed peripherally related not blood relative that Peter has,” Steve said like a promise.


	5. Righteous Anger | PG-13 | None

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PG-13 for language

Steve had what Bruce like to call “a righteous temper”. That meant that Steve had a habit of reacting first and thinking second whenever something came along that offended his morals. There were a lot of things that offended Steve’s morals.

Bullies. Mean people. Oppression. Violence. Abuse. Misleading signage at the grocery store. 

But what really got him, what never failed to make ignite the flame of dubious quality that was Steve’s temper was someone–anyone–hurting his friends. Steve had friends all around the station. He was friends with the desk clerks. He was friends with the beat cops. He was friends with the rookies. With the vice detectives, with the homicide detectives. He was even friends with that Actual Human Dramamine fellow that worked in the dusty corner a few of the guys joking referred to as “financial crimes”. Steve was friends with everyone except his superior officers.

Steve didn’t love a man who thought he deserved to tell anyone else what to do. (A funny sort of dislike for man whose ambition and natural bossiness was going to take him inevitably to the top.)

Steve was not friends with Tony. Steve had not been friends with Tony since they were paired up. Steve did not like Tony, not one bit, not even for a moment. 

That suited Tony fine because he wasn’t jumping at the chance to be friends with Steve. He hadn’t wanted the job, it had been forced on him, and now instead of building robots (and some things that were less legal that robot building), he was paired up with the most righteous and boring and stubbornly asexual man he’d ever met.

Tony didn’t know if Steve was actually against sex. But he did have a long list of things that he knew for sure Steve was against. (Smoking while pregnant, for instance, had involved Steve very seriously informing him of the dangers. It was good information, if somewhat misdirected.) Steve was also against public shaming, and that’s what was happening right now.

They had fucked up, somewhere along the line, and their fuck up meant a bad guy who shouldn’t have gotten away with it might just get away with it. But the man at the head of the room (Ross) wasn’t yelling at them because a bad man was going free, he was yelling because the mayor was “breathing down his neck” and well–

Tony was the newest, and possibly the only secret criminal in the room, and Ross especially seemed to hate him. Nobody else was going to say a damn word, because if Steve fucking Rogers didn’t like you then you weren’t protecting. So Tony was going to weather out the rant in silence, hanging his head and playing the chastised child (just like his Father taught him). He only looked up because under the shouting the whole room had gone quiet, as if everyone had started holding their breath.

Tony looked up to see Steve looking at him, squinting right at him as if he couldn’t understand for one second what he was seeing. Confusion gave way to realization, gave way to the sigh that always crossed Steve’s face. That last sigh that stood between normal, pleasant, always ready to lend a hand Steve and Righteous Anger Activated Steve, and well–

“That’s enough!” Steve said over Ross’ shouting.

Maybe Steve didn’t completely hate him after all.


End file.
